


The Artist, The Elm and Bandaged Feet

by JayneSmith



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Past Child Abuse, Sad Ending, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:47:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27786961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayneSmith/pseuds/JayneSmith
Summary: Joy is fleeting, despair is lasting, and that is the essence of all our creativity.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	The Artist, The Elm and Bandaged Feet

**Author's Note:**

> So I have been a bit useless at updating recently, as musey is being obstinate and family is a pain, but I had this on my hard drive so I thought I'd share. will get back to my fics once inspiration to write returns. sorry for the delay with my other storys!

I write this to record, to remember, the events of the winter in 2016, of a boy who would otherwise be lost among the multitudes of statistics and tragedies. I write of a boy named Ren, 11 years of age. Yet when I first saw him he looked the size of a 4-year-old. 

It was dark that night, dark as ebony, the only reason I noticed the child at the base of the elm as it had recently been the subject of my art. An artist's life in the mountains is a quiet one, filled with observations of the natural and the unnatural. Everything natural moved in the mountains, it was his stillness that disturbed me, The thought that I may have found a corpse was terrific, yet this fear was dispelled by puffs of vapour rising from the not yet cadaver.

I sometimes wonder if it would have been better to have left him there but immediately dispel the idea with disgust. The boy was cold and unresponsive when I first found him, he was lucky. Up in the mountains, the summer days are cold; the winter nights are abominable. 

So I carried the cold, fragile, unresponsive creature back to my rover and covered him with a towel and started back to my cabin… I couldn’t make the 3-hour drive to the hospital before the storm hit. 

The storm to come was one of those which could inspire poets, novelists and artists; the winds howled while the snow attempted to invade every crevice of the landscape leaving a blank sheet in its wake, a pure landscape, so to speak. 

The boy awoke as I pulled up to the cabin, I suppose the rush of cold air after being in the rover must have been what did it. He seemed to be in shock and attempted to run, he didn't get very far, his body was weak and tired and crumpled in the snow. So I once again scooped him up, this time carrying him into my cabin. He attempted to fight me off to no avail, with the strength of an infant, it was futile.

I sat him down at the table and secured the towel around his shoulders before going to the sink and turning the tap to fill a glass and turned back, and was met with an expressionless stare. In the light of the cabin, his dark eyes were piercing unmatched to his ragged hair. The boy's eyes gouged into me, examining me, testing and observing. His eyes did not seem to be that of a child, they reminded me of a wild animal; always observing, calculating and looking for an escape, his eyes scared me.

After placing the glass in front of him, I returned to the kitchen and turned on the stove to heat the kettle and looked for a clean cloth and bowl. 

I wondered what he had been doing at the base of that elm, it was a tragic enough object, with many tales associated with it.

As I approached him, he seemed to get smaller, sinking further back into his chair, so I placed the bowl on the table and picked up the boy. This time seating him on the table before me with his feet on my lap and began to clean them, he didn't fight this time, only whimpered and flinched.

Once the muck was cleared from his feet, one could see the reason for his fear. The soles of his feet were riddled with wounds, some scarred over, others fresh.

Injured in a place no one would see, it was nauseating.

By the time I had finished cleaning and bandaging his feet it was 3 in the morning. The boy laid silently on the sofa while I used the radio in my kitchen. I attempted to radio the local rangers but there was too much interference, the storm was now in full swing, and nobody would head out into that abyss.

So I grabbed a chair and sat by the window thinking about whom I should contact and watching the snow steadily and speedily hit my window. I could hear the boys steady breath and begun to wonder where he had come from. Yet more importantly I longed to know where he got those eyes. Eyes meant only for tragic characters in novels.

When I awoke the room was frigid, the window open and the boy was gone. This time I could get hold of the ranger who arranged a search party, he was not found and not reported missing by his orphanage until five days later. People assumed he was lost in the storm.

It was not till this morning that I remembered the elm, nostalgia overtook me as I drove over. I found the boy, as I had found him the first time in the embrace of the Elm, only now he had bandaged feet.


End file.
